A variable neighborhood search algorithm for human resource selection and optimization problem in the home appliance manufacturing industry

The increase in human resource cost puts forward higher requirements for the optimization of home appliance manufacturing processes. This paper studied an integrated human resource optimization problem considering the human resource selection, learning effect, skills degradation effect, and parallel production lines. There are multiple different manufacturing tasks with different normal processing times. Human resources have different abilities and costs. The actual processing time of a task is determined by its normal processing time, position, and ability of the human resource. The objective is to minimize production time and the labor cost. To solve the studied problem, we first consider the case where the human resources have been selected and assigned to the production lines. Then, some structural properties are proposed and a heuristic is developed to arrange tasks on every single production line. Also, we derive a lower bound for the problem. Since the investigated problem is NP-hard, a Variable Neighborhood Search is designed to solve the problem in a reasonable time. Finally, computational experiments are conducted and the experimental results validate the performance of the proposed methods.